Brazil: A Hotbed of Tech Innovation and Setting of our Latest Hackathon

We’ve held a number of successful hackathons around the world and recently hosted our biggest one ever in São Paulo, Brazil. Teaming up with Samsung and Wayra Incubator, we challenged developers and designers to build apps that would work on the Evernote platform over the course of just 48 hours.

Brazil is home to a solid startup community and a hotbed of talent. In fact, two of the winning teams in our Devcup competition at ETC (EV & Spotwish) are based out of Brazil. For our second hackathon in the country (the first was held in May), we wanted to drum up excitement by embarking on a roadshow that would introduce students at prominent Brazilian universities and technical prep schools to the Evernote platform and our event. Over 100 developers and designers accepted our challenge and we were thrilled to see what they came up with.

Hack time

This year, we’ve been focused on collaborating with technology partners that compliment and enhance our cloud service. Teaming up with Samsung Brazil, we gave developers the opportunity to create apps that would run on Samsung Android devices and leverage the Evernote API, our platform for storing and creating notes for users. This was our first platform-specific hackathon and introduced us to some amazing developers working to solve big challenges.

On the day of the Hackathon, participants arrived at the premier hub for tech innovation in South America: Wayra Brazil HQ, a Telefonica Digital initiative to promote entrepreneurship and accelerate disruptive startups in Europe and Latin America. The schedule for the weekend included:

A developer meetup at a local restaurant where participants were provided with an overview of our platform and had the opportunity to meet and think about app project ideas for the weekend.

Kickoff. Right away, developers naturally formed into groups of 2-4 and spent the next 24 hours planning, prototyping, designing, and coding their projects through completion.

Wrap up. 20 teams presented their apps and demo to the audience and a lineup of Evernote, Samsung and Wayra judges.

Prizes, Pitches, and the Big Winners

Three levels of prizes were up for grabs:

First place: A trip to Evernote HQ in Silicon Valley for mentoring, Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet, and a Galaxy Camera

Second place: Week of mentoring in São Paulo with Evernote and a Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet

All participants received 3 months of Evernote Premium, Samsung devices for raffle, and additional giveaways

And the first place winner was…

Epicnote, an app that uses game mechanics to analyze and improve your use of Evernote. You can learn more about it here.

The Evernote Ecosystem & Platform

Thousands of developers are using the Evernote platform to build some incredible apps that provide an even more powerful experience to our users. Our goal for this hackathon and others is to support these developers as they build apps that could be used on a daily basis by millions of people.
We look forward to hosting more hackathons and developer events in the new year. If you are a developer or designer who is interested in building apps and features that work with Evernote, make sure to review the API documentation on our Evernote developer website.

Visit the Evernote Trunk, our collection of apps and products that help you do more with Evernote, to discover products and services that enhance your Evernote experience.